


If You Can Keep Your Head

by goldfinch



Series: Super 8 [2]
Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Isolation, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 18:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4636371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a locked motel room in southern California, Will Gorski is quietly going mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Can Keep Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to [If You Can Talk With Crowds](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4493277/chapters/10215570). It's standalone, but reading the original will give you the other side of the story - and the end.
> 
> Title from Rudyard Kipling's "If—"

Light. Nausea. A groggy, drugged haze like the time his frat buddies got him absolutely shit-faced and convinced him to streak across their college football field. Same thick, muffled silence; same clear, ruthless light.

He is in a hotel room. The bedspread is a noncommittal beige and red diamond pattern; the lamp, which is on, has a simple white shade. There is a desk but no television, and just the one bed, but the door’s on the wrong side of the room and Will certainly didn’t pull the curtains closed or—or duct-tape them shut. Fuck. Will sits up. The last thing he remembers is drifting off again in a car that smelled like overripe bananas and spilled coffee, the sun pouring gold across Riley’s face in the driver’s seat.

And then his mind shudders to a halt. _Riley._

He looks wildly around the room, half expecting to see her standing in a corner, or sitting on the bed beside him—but of course she isn’t there. He suspects, in some weirdly instinctive way, that he would have felt it if she had been, even before he saw her face.

He knows though, somehow, that he is not in Chicago, the same way he knows he is no longer in Iceland. The air is too dry for either place, even indoors, and there’s a certain dusty smell, not of shut-in places but of hot summer sun and no water. He’s not sure how much of that he actually knows, and how much is just impressions from the rest of the cluster, maybe Cepheus, but—

A door slams open somewhere, so hard that it cracks back against the wall. He hears voices in the other room, the first one sharpened to a point, and for a moment he’s afraid it’s Whispers, that is was some back-alley version of a mental institution. He remembers Nomi’s fear, the frantic escape through San Francisco’s colorful streets, and feels incapable of getting through something similar right now, all alone.

Except he’s not alone. 

Riley comes through the door, and his heart has time for one high, glad leap before she’s throwing her arms around him and kissing him, and he’s kissing her, his hands on her hips and her hands on his face. He breathes her name into her mouth and it feels like his soul flaring back to life inside him. Riley.

“You’re back,” she whispers, crying through her smile. “You’re back. You’re okay.”

“Yeah.” He presses his lips to her forehead and holds her until he knows she’s real. Then he pulls away. There are other things that have to be dealt with. “Where are we?” he asks. “This doesn’t look like Iceland.”

Near the door, Sun shakes her head. Will blinks at her. Has she always been there? “You cannot ask us that,” she says. “Whispers—“

“He’s still looking for us,” Riley says. She’s touching his chest, his arms, his face, her fingers light and skimming, as though she’s half afraid to touch him again at all. God, but he loves this woman. “We’re still in danger,” she says. “I couldn’t let you wither away like that anymore, it was terrible, but we have to be very careful about what we tell you, because—”

And then Whispers is there too, with all the silent suddenness of an apparition. Will feels his body lock up, and he thinks desperately of Reykjavik, and snow, and Iceland’s nameless rivers.

“He’s here,” he says, through gritted teeth.

“What?”

“Whispers.”

Riley’s head snaps around. “Where.”

“Beside you. He’s—“

Reykjavik. Endless green hills. Icebergs sloughing forward in the water. 

Whispers chuckles. “Will, I know you’re not there anymore. A fisherman saw a friend of Riley’s launch his boat nearly three weeks ago. Magnus, his name was. I’m afraid he hasn’t been heard from since.” He pauses, and Will can’t feel anything but he knows, by the look on Whispers’ face, that he is somehow rooting around in Will’s skull. After a moment, Whispers’ lip curls. “You don’t know where you are.” He turns toward Riley. “But she does.”

Riley is saying something.

“It’s okay,” Will says, “I can ignore him.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them he’s looking at Riley. Her face is worried and pale, but she’s happy, too; he’s getting waves of relief and joy, but emotions seem to be all he’s getting. He can’t get inside her head the way he’d been able to when they visited each other. With the panic and fear of Iceland, he can’t remember if it had been different then. Maybe, he thinks, that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. 

“So, I mean, as long as I don’t know where we are, we’re safe, right?”

“We hope,” Sun says. “Of course this is all theoretical, but when you were unconscious it was as though a part of me had been chopped away, and it was the same for Riley, and for the others. Your plan was not feasible, long-term.”

“No. I know. But everyone’s safe? Everyone else?”

“For now, yes.”

Riley is sitting so close he can smell the soap she’s been using: a light, creamy smell, milk and honey, her perfume over it a complicated layer of florals.

Sun turns to leave, saying something as she goes, but Will doesn’t catch it. He’s too busy looking at Riley, at the fine skin at her neck, at her beautiful storm-blue eyes.

“Such a lovely girl. You know, when I had her in Iceland, when I’d drugged her and tied her to that table there was a thought in my head, a terrible thought, that perhaps, before I tore her mind literally in two, I would—“

“Shut up.”

Riley’s hands pull back. “What?”

“I—nothing. It’s nothing. Come on. Come on.” He all but drags her hands back toward him, pressing them against his chest. It helps, and so he kisses her.

“I’m so looking forward to cutting her head open. You know, the brain itself can’t feel pain, so patients are often kept conscious during our little operation. She’ll be awake to feel that moment when you vanish from her mind, and let me tell you, the _pain_ of it is absolutely ex _qui_ site—“

Will pulls away. Whispers has sat down on the edge of the bed, insubstantial as any spirit; Will’s more concerned by how close he’s sitting to Riley. Her eyes are clear and happy, though, and her smile is so genuine Will knows she can’t see Whispers, can’t even sense him.

“It’s not really as terrible as it sounds, though, you know, Will. For her, it will only last a moment. And then she’ll be gone from you forever, as good as dead—it’s a rather unfortunate side effect of the procedure, but it does make them much easier to control. You remember Niles Bolger.” He chuckles. “Taking this beautiful girl will be just as easy….” He runs a finger, very lightly, down Riley’s face, and that’s it, that’s more than Will can take. He lunges forward, reaching out to get Whispers in a chokehold—

But he’s not there. Will goes headfirst off the edge of the bed, and when he turns around, Whispers is laughing.

“ _Will_ ,” Riley says, wide-eyed. “What on earth—?”

“He just—Whispers—“ He can’t get the words out, can’t tell her what Whispers was doing, and he knows, instinctively, the way he knew he wasn’t in Iceland, that Whispers will keep coming back. And he’ll keep saying things about Riley, if she’s here. “I think it’d be better if you left,” Will says, and almost chokes on the words.

Riley stares at him for a moment, silent, and then says faintly, “What?”

“Whispers….” He draws his feet up, crossing them beneath him on the floor. From this angle the ceiling fan is just behind Riley’s head, a halo of light that catches in the ends of her hair, and leaves her face a little in shadow. “He’s saying… things. About you. I can’t listen to him say things like that about you Riley, I can’t, and as long as you’re here….”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” she demands. Will opens his mouth, then closes it again. He hadn’t expected an argument, but then, hadn’t he promised her once that he would never leave her? Hadn’t he saved her life? “I brought you all this way for you to tell me to leave?”

He closes his eyes. Whispers is looking at him. Smiling. “Riley, please.”

He listens to the bedsprings squeak, listens to her footsteps, listens to the door slam shut. When he opens his eyes, she’s gone—but Whispers is still there, still sitting at the edge of the bed, hands neatly folded over one thigh. Will pushes himself to his feet.

“What are you doing now?” Whispers asks. He sounds almost interested.

“I told you to shut up.”

In addition to duct-taping the drapes closed, Riley’s gotten rid of all the pens and hotel stationary. She has removed the phone, and the television, but in the bathroom she’s left a toothbrush, a bottle of shampoo, and a bar of Dove soap. He unboxes the soap, turns the package over. 

© UNILEVER, TRUMBULL, CT 08611  
Imported by/Importé par  
UNILEVER CANADA TORONTO, ON M4W 3R2

So he’s in North America, at least, although whether America or Canada is a coin toss. That’s a lot of ground to cover, even with Whispers standing in the doorway watching him, and they could be anywhere. They’re safe. Riley is safe. 

“You don’t believe that, Will,” Whispers says. “That’s why you knocked yourself out in Iceland.”

“Fuck off.”

There’s a desk in the bedroom, and a pair of pictures hanging on the walls; one over the bed, the other over the desk. They’re nothing special, just decorative copies. Pastoral scenes: one empty, the other with a house that looks a lot like those framed ones old ladies always seem to have, golden lights at dusk, a tender cobblestone pathway, wildflowers spilling riotously from the beds.

“You know, Will,” Whispers says, “this isn’t the way I wanted to go about this, but I can make do. It won’t be hard. I have all the time in the world.”

Will closes his eyes.

 

 

 

 

He’s awake for most of the night, a fact he knows only because the rooms around him go quiet, and the temperature drops a bit. He doesn’t think it’s because the indeterminable amount of time he spent in a medically induced coma counts as sleep—more a combination of fear and nervous alertness. When Whispers disappears, Will spends a while trying to calculate time zone differences and whether or not Whispers is the kind of man who would stay up late or go to bed early or if he’d only had to go do something else.

In the morning, he wakes up to find an english muffin and egg sandwich and a cup of coffee on his desk. Riley must have come in while he was asleep. The sandwich is cold; the coffee is still hot. It was the smell of it that woke him up, all those Saturday dog watch shifts with Diego early in his career, cramped squad car, just the two of them, Will drifting off in the passenger seat because he’d met a girl the night before. Diego coming back from signing off on their gas receipt saying, “Look alive, Gorski. This shit’s fresh from 7-11.” 

It’s strange, after such a long period of drifting unconsciousness, to actually be able to wake up at all—stranger still to wake up with nothing to do. He can hear voices in the next room, but he forces himself not to listen; he knows the risk, now. He knows what the wrong piece of information in his head could do to them.

“I’ll go ahead and assume it’s morning where you are, then?” Whispers asks.

Will whirls around. Whispers is standing this time, leaned with his arms crossed against the bathroom doorway. “You gonna watch me piss now too?” Will asks, glancing at the sink area. “You gonna watch me take a shit?”

Whispers looks up toward the ceiling. “ _Children_ , all of you. Do you realize, Will, how long I’ve been doing this? Twenty-three years. When I started you were probably still wetting the bed at night. I’ve gotten very good at predicting people. Although—“ he taps one finger against his temple— “it does help to have an in. And you, Will, you’re easy. You want to do the right thing. You want to help people. You don’t want to die.” 

He pauses, staring at Will. “Egg McMuffin and coffee,” he says flatly. “Now Will, you know that’s not very helpful. McDonalds is all over the world. One in almost every city in North America.”

“You can’t make me tell you shit,” Will says, almost spitting. The hours before he fell asleep had been a reprieve, but Whispers’ presence is already weighing on him, like mud on his shoes. Will’s tracking him everywhere. “You can’t make me know something I don’t.”

“That’s true. But I’ll bet all you need to do is peel the tape off that window over there. You look out that window, I look out that window, we see a street sign, easy. Your girlfriend took out the phone and the television; that was clever. But it’s not absolute. Short of locking you in a padded cell, there’s always a way. You know that better than anyone.”

He can’t make Whispers disappear, and he can’t stop listening. Even if they weren’t locked in a room together, Whispers is literally a figment of his imagination, and you can’t escape what’s in your head. But Whispers can’t stay 24-7, either. He has a life to lead, wherever he is, and when he finally goes it’s like clicking a television screen off. Suddenly, the room is silent. Will can hear children laughing in the room beneath them, and for a while he wonders what their lives are like. What mundane worries they have, what fears, what joys. It’s impossible to guess, but it also isn’t very hard at all.

And then the door opens. Will turns, heart in his throat, but it isn’t Riley, and for a moment he stares at the doorway because this doesn’t make any sense. It’s Sun. Coming into the room with a Subway bag hung from each wrist, a bottled water in one hand and a coke in the other. Will blinks. Oh. 

“You’re really here,” he says.

She smiles, very slightly. “And I come bearing gifts.”

“No I mean—you’re really here. You’re not just visiting.” Sun hands him the coke, then his sandwich. Will takes them both, still a little stunned. “It just felt like… like I was imagining you. You didn’t seem real. I just—I thought you were in prison?”

Sun smiles a little, sets the sandwiches down. “You did not imagine it. I was released only three days ago.” She stares at him for a moment, then, and he can tell she’s deciding what she can say, what is safe, what she should withhold. “My brother confessed to what he had done. Not to killing my father, which I am positive he also did, because he is a thief and a liar and a coward, too—but he did confess to embezzlement. He received eight years in prison, and I walked free.”

Will stares at her, puzzled. Something about that doesn’t make sense. He knows Sun’s brother; he’s seen her memories and he felt her rage when she realized what Joong-Ki had done. “You mean he just woke up one day and decided to confess? The police hadn’t found any evidence against him or anything?”

“Yes.” Sun’s smile gets a little wider. “Everyone was quite surprised.” She unfolds her sandwich wrapper, and lifts the sandwich to her mouth. “Eat,” she says, gesturing toward his. “Good food is important for morale.”

They haven’t spent much time together, but Will finds her company soothing, somehow. She doesn’t run as hot as Riley does; there’s no twined cord of need between them. She’s polite, and doesn’t speak much, but that’s just because it’s more in her nature to watch until the moment is right to intervene.

“I guess you can’t tell me if there are any plans, huh,” Will says, biting into his sandwich. It’s the first solid food he’s had in weeks, probably, and it’s probably the best thing he’s ever tasted. Turkey, with everything on it and a little mustard, just the way he likes. 

“I’m afraid not. I also cannot tell you where you are, or talk about the others, or tell you anything that Whispers might use to his advantage.” Her tone then is dry, with a sharp edge of amusement. “As you can imagine, that severely limits our conversation topics.”

Will smiles a little. “Well. I mean. Seen any good movies lately?”

“No. I don’t much care for movie-going, I’m afraid.” Again that dry tone, that twist of amusement. “And it is especially difficult to do when one is in prison.”

“Ah, right. I um… forgot about that, actually.” He laughs, half nervous. He’s good at reading people, and he knows without being in her head that it’s a sensitive topic. 

Her hands are graceful, even if her gaze is distant and her voice detached. “I’m glad someone did,” she says. “It’s much harder to do when you’re the one inside. As I’m sure you understand.”

 

 

 

 

“Ah, good, you’re awake.”

Whispers again. Will rolls over, staring at him through half-closed eyes. Whispers hasn’t, thank God, lain down beside him on the bed, but he’s standing just beside it, staring down, a smug-looking smile on his face. That wakes Will up.

“What’s happened?”

“You’ll find out,” Whispers says. “Soon enough.”

Will’s mind immediately goes to Riley, and he’s already reaching for her in his mind, a bright spark of consciousness nearby, a warmth he can never turn away from—and then he clamps down again, hard. Going to her would expose them. Would expose her. He drops his head in his hands, half so he can’t see Whispers, half because he’s feeling tired, suddenly, the weight of the realization draining his urgency from him like someone’s put a hole in his heart. It’s going to be like this until Whispers is taken care of. Riley’s always going to be a breath away, but completely unreachable. 

Police work is a lot of long lulls and sudden crescendoes, moments where his heart’s in his throat and he’s got a gun in his hand, where things are life-or-death for someone. That kid dying against the wall, that gunfight that stretched over three city blocks and involved a couple civilians. Now the fear and anxiety is low but nearly constant; there are no lulls here, in this hotel room, just the low steady buzz of adrenaline in his veins.

Whispers paces, looking almost gleeful—and then after another minute or so he stops, mid-step, staring toward the bathroom. “What?” His tone is surprised, a little alarmed. And then he disappears.

He’s gone for hours. Will hates it when Whispers is here, but it’s almost worse when he’s gone because then Will’s always waiting for him to come back. What had he been so excited about? What went wrong?

That evening Sun brings him an armful of magazines and another Subway sandwich, with meatballs this time. She doesn’t say much. Just asks how he is, if Whispers has been by again. Will doesn’t tell her he was there half the night. He spent the other half listening for sounds from the other room, hoping to hear Riley cough or roll over or mumble something in her sleep, but there was nothing.

He knows he’s not supposed to reach out, but just sitting here he can feel the confused eddy of Sun’s emotions. Anger, guilt, grief. So strong it feels like he’s about to vomit. “What’s wrong?”

She looks up, eyes sharp.

“It’s just me asking,” he says. “Whispers isn’t even here.”

She shakes her head. Picks a piece of lettuce from her sandwich and lays it carefully to the side. Her expression softens, and grows more uncertain, but when she speaks her voice is perfectly matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t matter. Whispers knows who I am and the incident is a matter of public record. My brother hung himself in his cell earlier today. It appears he was as unsuited to the rigors of prison life as I believed he would be.”

“Do you… wanna talk about it?”

Her refusal is prompt and decisive. “Thank you, but no.”

Was this what Whispers had to leave for? Was it something else? It’s killing him not to know. It’s killing him that the only person he has any hope of getting answers from is Whispers himself.

 

 

 

 

But Whispers doesn’t say anything about it. His mood settles into something black and catching. Will thinks maybe three days go by, but it’s hard to tell; time is a blur, and his sleeping patterns are still shot to hell. Sometimes he gets two sandwiches in a row; sometimes Sun brings leftovers. Chow mien, fried rice, Chinese food that sits heavy and greasy in his stomach. He wants kimchi, and fresh ginger. He wants dried fish and spicy pork dishes and a good craft beer, roti and Mamsam Koora.

Sometimes, when they’re awake, he gets glimpses of things—not visiting, but like it had been at the beginning, before he knew what any of this meant, when he tasted beer when he was drinking coffee and had cravings for Korean barbecue and walked out into sunshine thinking it was raining. 

Water against his face, cool and clean; the warm burn of really good vodka.

The others are out there, somewhere, doing things. He doesn’t—can’t—know what. This is his life now: the confines of this hotel room and the mental version of a press blackout. Whenever Whispers tell him something, he clings to every word. It’s god damn embarrassing, but he can’t help it.

“Everyone you and your friends know seem to be dying,” Whispers says. “Sun’s brother, Capheus’ mother, the rest of Wolfgang’s family. Even your father is gone, Will, did you know that? He just vanished one day. None of his friends seem to know where he is. Don’t you think that’s peculiar, Will? I’m—“ Whispers chuckles— “well, a little worried about him, to be honest. After all, he’s an alcoholic. You’ve had to come pick him up from the bar so many times—do you think he’s hurt himself? Been killed, even? He’s been gone for over a week, Will. Anything could happen in a week.”

“You’re lying.”

“Oh no, Will. No. I am most certainly not. You really don’t have any idea where he could be?”

Involuntarily, he thinks of the lake house; he think of the boat in the harbor, and the times his dad has talked about taking it down the Mississippi. Typical drunk Dad, to want to be Huckleberry Finn at 50, but Will knows he’d never do it, so Whispers knows that, too.

When Whispers disappears again—he comes and goes, like a hummingbird or a spirit in a haunted house, some creature with a secret life of its own—Will sits heavily on the end of the bed and puts his head in his hands. Even though he’s sleeping ten or eleven hours a day, he’s still exhausted. There’s nothing to do, no one to talk to. Sun’s magazines lie in unread piles on the desk, the book she brought to read on the plane stacked on top of a couple James Patterson mysteries from whatever big-box all-purpose store the hotel is nearest. Once he started hating the guy, Sun stopped bringing his books, but either there’s nothing else available or she’s run out of money because she hasn’t brought him anything else, either. He re-read _Worst Case_ once but all it did was make him think of Whispers, and that’s even worse than thinking of Chicago.

He misses Chicago. He misses his old life. 

He misses Riley, just on the other side of the wall.

 

 

 

 

“Tell me something,” he asks Sun. “Please. Anything. There’s a plan, right? You have a plan?”

Sun’s gaze is flat and dark on the other side of the bed. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, wiping the last of the mustard from her fingers. They had Subway again: Cold Cut Combo for him; Veggie Delight for her. Will would have thought he’d get better at reading her, with time, but if anything she’s even more unfathomable now than she was. It’s like staring at a statue, or the inscrutable silence of an oil painting. “I’m sorry, Will,” she says. “You know I can’t tell you anything. Do I need to explain why?”

“No.”

Sun doesn’t say anything for a long while, but eventually she folds up her garbage, collects Will’s, and leaves. She pauses in the doorway, though, one hand on the frame, the other room just visible past the gentle curve of her shoulder blades. It looks a lot like Will’s room. He can’t see any windows. “She misses you too,” Sun says. Suddenly she just looks tired. “She wants me to tell you she loves you.”

Then she shuts the door. Will wants to leap across the room and jerk it open again, wants to take Sun by the shoulders and shake until she tells him something useful, something more than these oblique misdirections, these blunt refusals, these appeals to his better sense.

“Temper, Will,” Whispers says from behind him.

Will closes his eyes.

There’s a detached calm in Whispers’ voice Will recognizes from interrogations, a certain tone that makes everything about you seem ridiculous. And he’s watched enough interrogations to know a good one can loop a person’s logic back over their neck and tighten until the only thing left for them to do is hang themselves. He won’t let that happen with him. “Why are you doing this?” he asks. “What do you want? What’s the point of killing people?”

“We’re not killing them, Will. We’re simply ensuring the survival of the human race.”

Will pauses. “I’m sorry, _what_ did you just say?”

“Don’t you realize the damage people like us can cause, if the wrong person was born into a cluster? You’re a policeman, Will.” Whisper’s face is serious. His voice is almost sad. “I thought you would have realized there was evil in the world.”

“We aren’t evil. None of us are evil. “

“Yes, well. You’d be surprised, the things even good people are willing to do.”

“To protect the people they care about.”

“Exactly that. They’ll lie, steal, betray, even murder. All in the name of love. Your friend, that German boy, he killed ten people to protect his friend. The Korean, Sun, she killed two of our employees in Iceland.”

“You were trying to kill Riley,” Will spits. No matter what Whispers says, he will never forgive him for that, will never see reason. His love for Riley is blinding, even when he hasn’t seen her for days—his fault, he reminds himself. That was a choice he made. He has to live with it, same as everyone else.

Whispers shakes his head. “For the good of humanity.”

The scary thing is, Will looks at him and knows he believes it.

 

 

 

 

“Where are you?” Whispers asks in the night, in the lamplit afternoons as Will eats lunch with Sun, who says little and seems even more a ghost than Whispers does these days, Whispers who is always with him. 

The nights drift by. Lamplight and shadows. What’s Diego doing right now? Where is his father? Is anything even being done about Whispers?

“Where are you, Will? Hm? Come on. Just look outside and tell me where you are.”


End file.
